For physics and engineering, it’s not so impressive. As a test, I tried to do the calculation I did last week to point out that the amount of energy in a year’s production of antimatter from CERN was equivalent to less than a teaspoon of gasoline. For that, I used Google and a calculator, and it took less than 5 minutes.

At CERN we make quantities of the order of 107 antiprotons per second and there are 6×1023 of them in a single gram of antihydrogen. You can easily calculate how long it would take to get one gram: we would need 6×1023/107=6×1016 seconds. There are only 365 (days) x 24 (h) x 60 (min) x 60 (sec) = around 3×107 seconds in a year, so it would take roughly 6×1016 / 3×107 = 2×109 = two billion years!

so half a nanogram per year. That’s a whole nanogram of mass-energy for a year’s output, since you also count the mass of the matter it annihilates with. Back to W|A: